The MeatEater Podcast - Ep. 288: Viscera and Bones

Episode Date: August 30, 2021

Steven Rinella talks with Ted Franklin Belue, Phil Taylor, Corinne Schneider, and Janis Putelis. Topics discussed: Jani's trouble with pant zippers; majoring in Boone and minoring in Kenton; dropping out of school to play the banjo; Ted being an extra in Last of the Mohicans; fashion forward longhunters; Boone's "tick licker"; the difference between a long rifle and a musket; making your own powder with your urine; the importance of basic diplomacy and not reveling in war; the first long hunt in Kentucky; a skeleton in a sycamore; alot of mythology; how Boone sang to his dogs; the two mysteries; hybrid accounts, footnotes, and a second West; the strange fate of Boone's remains and when bones and viscera are in different places; women civilizing men; Finding Daniel Boone, The Long Hunt, The Hunters of Kentucky, and the rest of Belue's books; and more.Connect with Steve and MeatEaterSteve on Instagram and TwitterMeatEater on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YoutubeShop MeatEater Merch Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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First Light. Go farther, stay longer. Yanni's having some trouble with the zipper on his shorts. I was wondering if you'd like to talk about this on the air. The zipper on his shorts does not provide enough opening. Yes. Now, someone might see where I might be going with this, and I'm not.

It's not what can't come out. It's that he can't get his hand in there. Chafes his hand's that he can't get his hand in there. Chafes his hand and he tries to get his hand in there and it pops the button. Very disappointing. He's returning these shorts. I've had a pair of jeans that were like a low rise, I think. I didn't notice when I bought them. They were like a low rise cut

which means that they still got to have the crotch in the same place but because the waistline is lower, you end up having less zipper. Like a lower ass neck tattoo? No. No, you don't have a butterfly tattooed back there. But buyer beware of short zippers.

I might be revealing too much here. Am I the only person that when they need to unzip, they also unbutton? No, my six-year-old does that. Not only does he do that, he drops them down to the back of his knees. Okay. I don't do that, Steve.

Thank you. But yeah, I don't know. You might be younger. You are younger, but you might be used to this different style of pants than I am that just always have short zippers, and thus you're used to just always unbuttoning. Yanni was raised during an era of generous zippers. Big, long zippers. What's happened in this country?

And then people got tight. People got tight. Well, I'll tell you what's happened in this country. People got tight with zipper material, Phil. Joined today by historian Ted Ballew. Daniel Boone historian. The first frontier historian.

Former professor in the history department of Franklin University. That's because you retired, not because you got fired or anything, right? No, it's a Murray State University. Why does it say Franklin University? Why did I put Franklin University?

Because Franklin is my middle name. Oh, your middle name, I knew that, but your middle name got bumped down. Sorry, that was my fault. I don't have my own university. I'm working on that. You're not like Trump? I'm still thinking about the zipper issue.

I'm thinking, you know, Daniel Boone had a loincloth and a sash. You just go from the side. It works better. I would have probably dribbled on it. Pardon me, I was probably sleep typing when I wrote Franklin University. His middle

name, Ted Franklin Blue. Thank you. Murray State University. Sorry. Yeah, they'll appreciate that better back home. Let me see if you started your own school. I'd enroll, man. I'd do a double major.

Well, thank you. You would major in what? I'd major in Boone and Kenton. Daniel Boone with a minor in Simon Kenton. And a banjo player. Did I mention that already? Nope. No, I'm discombobulated.

Yeah, I did that for several years. I mean, I still pick, but yeah, I dropped out of college actually to play banjo. It was all, I had a free ride. It was all paid for, but I said, no, I want to play. And so that's what I did for two or three years. Yeah. And down in Florida, kind of a no name, but we played the same Southeastern circuit as Bill Monroe and Lester Flatt and Ralph Stanley. Ralph, if people saw the movie, Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, he sang, Oh Death, he sang that. And Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley were playing with Ralph then, and Marty Stewart, who was about 13 or 14 was playing with um Lester Flatt and Vince Gill was in high school he was playing with the Bluegrass Alliance and um then there was me who

nobody knew and still can't get my name right seven years later so I want to know if the uh but you went back to college it was it yeah it my wife's idea. Was it still free? Was it still paid for when you went back three years later? It was not. I moved to Kentucky to play in a band, and that didn't work out so well. Then I was kind of reduced to Wendy's and painting gutters. And then I ran trap lines for four years. And I was thinking about going down to the Gulf and maybe work on some oil rig down there, like commercial diving

type stuff. And my wife said, why don't you go back to school? And she's always been kind of the brain to the blue outfit. And I go, that's a lot safer. Plus I can be on land. And that's what I did. Yes. Were you on a full ride banjo scholarship? No, my, my father was a veteran of World War II, and he had the GI Bill. He passed on when I was a boy. Oh, it transferred. Yeah, right. Yeah, it's a good gig. And then he was a mailman, and so he also had civil service benefits.

And so as long as I stayed in and didn't drop out for more than one year, it was paid for. But I dropped out and said, I want to play banjo. That's where the money is. Did you go on to, so did you go on, you went on to get like a doctorate? No, I never did. I went back, I actually majored in wildlife biology, but I couldn't pass chemistry. My actual interests then, and largely still are, were ichthyology. I wanted to study particularly bull shark behavior and either that or herpetology and study particularly eastern diamondbacks and deal with habitat issues with the Crotalus adamantius, the eastern diamondback. But I

loved history. And so when I realized that that was not going to happen because I couldn't pass chemistry, I just sat down one day with the curriculum guy. And I go, what do I like? And I, you know, what can I do? And so I went to history and they were having, you know, I had American Indian studies. They had, you know, the American West. And I said, I love this stuff. And I was in Kentucky. And when I was a boy, I was really hung up on Daniel Boone.

I mean, mania and third, fourth, fifth grade. I mean, I literally told my parents in fourth grade, and my sister will be hearing this. She can probably confirm it. I said, I'm not going to study any more math and sentence diagramming. I just want to study Earl Scruggs on the banjo and Daniel Boone. And that didn't go over well. But that's what you did. Yeah, pretty much.

I kind of went through a mountain man period. And I like John Wayne and the Alamo. But yeah, pretty much Boone. And then by junior high, I started seeing cheerleaders and stuff. And I said, this is more alive than Daniel Boone. Like cheerleading. Yeah, not me personally. Yeah, it wasn't me personally.

But yeah, it kind of, and then we moved to Kentucky. Like I said, my wife and I, her name is Lavina, which by the way was also the name of one of Boone's daughters. Oh, that's cool. Yeah, it is. It's really kind of unusual. And when I got back to Kentucky, I happened to go by one time, there was a flintlock shooting exhibition. And I said, wow. And it really struck a nerve. And then I read Alan Eckert's book, The Frontiersman, about. That's a good-ass book. And I did Simon Kitten and Tecumseh. And it just, all of a sudden, I was dreaming as a kid again about torch cabins and upraised ball head war clubs and flintlocks and powder horns.

Take note of that war club hanging over your head? Yeah, it was. That one. Wow. Yeah. Was that specifically for me yet, or did you steal that from Magwa? No, we were gifted that. That was from Magwa.

We were gifted that by a guest. From Wes Studi. Here's Steve. Use this instead of a bow. Hey, but you were an extra. We got to hit a couple things, but I want to talk about one other thing. You were an extra in Last of the Mohicans. How long did you hang around there?

I did that. It was almost eight weeks. It was just under eight weeks I kept waiting to get killed in the massacre scene because I had it all all ready to go with this buddy of mine from Skytook Oklahoma he's a Shawnee and I go like wow I'm gonna get killed by a real Shawnee and uh that it didn't happen because you remember the last scene was the big Massacre it kept raining and that valley was inundated. So I had to come back to Murray State and teach World Civ.

And no one ever killed you? No, no. I got killed a bunch. I made $300 one time. One night I made $300 in six hours getting killed. How'd you get killed that time? You know, there was cannon shredding, and you had these kind of like minor bumps. You had the real stuntmen, and then had these kind of like minor bumps for guys.

You had the real stuntmen, and then they had the people that weren't that bright that would be willing to do stuff for more money. That's kind of the category I was in. But you had your own personal getup on. No, well, no, I had whatever they had. Oh, so you didn't bring your own period dress. They gave you the dress. I wanted to, but no, I would be a British red coat for a while with a brown best musket. Then they'd switch. You couldn't have paid me enough to do that. Then they'd switch off and they said, okay, be a French guy for a while.

And so you'd put on the French Marine outfit and you get the Charleville musket, then they switch it back. And a lot of it was hurry up and away. But, yeah, it was a fascinating thing. I mean, I knew that I would never have an experience like that again. And, I mean, you can't just go anywhere and see a near full-scale reproduction of Fort William Henry, 1757. And the first night on the set where we really got past the exercises, because the first week was calisthenics. Captain Dale Dye, he wrote, he co-wrote Top Gun and Platoon. He trained all those guys. He was 21 year Marine vet. He's like, all right, you know, he just, worst profanity in the world, quite colorful. But, you know, once we got past

the week of training with him, got out there and the first night, you know, take one and you would have the pyrotechnics going off. I fire a cannon. I'm a French Marine. I took my coat off so my mom could maybe see me. And, uh, hey mom. And so, um, you know, they had 1800 Indians just come up out of the shadows and you just get chill bumps and the pyrotechnics are going, you go like, you'll never see anything like that. Did you die with dignity or were you like? Most of the time. Die clean?

Sometimes I was indignant because I realized how little I was getting paid for this. And so, you know, I'd crawl back and try to live again. Down, you know, plus I had a French name, Baloo, Baloo. So you got killed by shrapnel. Did you get knifed or anything like that ever? Nothing cool like that, but no, mainly it left me with really bad tinnitus. I mean, I, my ears are still popping. Um, cause the pyrotechnics.

Yeah, but they gave us little earplugs. And so that were like, that was close enough. Were they period, period earplugs? Foam. Oh, really? Yeah. I don't think that they, the Greeks, I think the Greeks had it then, you know, because of the sponges.

Okay. We'll get back to Daniel Boone. We're going to get into Daniel Boone hardcore. Big time. I hope we do. Big time. You know what's interesting to me, and this is why I'm fascinated.

Boone has been dead 201 years this year. No. Yeah. And so why are we talking about Daniel Boone? We should have done it last year when it was the 200th anniversary of his death. Well, I had a book come out then, and it came out the same day that he died, September 26, 1820. And I was like, but what was going on then? COVID.

And it was about the title of it. Where's Daniel Boone buried? I mean, that's not actually the title. I can't remember his last day, Daniel Boone, his last days in Missouri and the strange fate of his remains. Cause there's a lot of controversy about where was he buried? So I said, well, this is great. It'll be the 200th anniversary and they'll come out and, and, uh, COVID. Did it come out? Yeah, September 26th. Didn't sell like hotcakes. 35 cents a stack.

What do you mean? That's how hotcakes sell. Oh. It's a Southern joke. They don't say that in Michigan, I guess. It sells like a hotcake, 35 cents a stack. I got you. It's a bluegrass joke.

Okay. Yeah, we're north of that. Can I get a southerner? We don't get bluegrass humor. Clay might get a joke. Clay'd probably get a joke like that. He's not here. Oh, after Yanni presented to us,

so if you go back in a couple episodes, Yanni presented to us about him being out with Bart George doing mountain lion research And They're practicing I like like I'm telling you this because you don't know this They're testing I'm interested though Let's see you get a mountain lion hanging around

Yeah Boots son Daniel Morgan had a Real bad experience with a mountain lion. So yeah, I love mountain lions. So you're tuned in. Yeah. Let's say you get a mountain lion hanging around and they want to find a way to haze it. They want to like get it so it's not habituated

to humans, spook it off. What they're working on is they go and put a collar on the lion and they approach it with sounds. They actually play this podcast to the mountain line to see at what point. Like the zipper part. We should switch it.

We should switch it so it's a zipper. A little, but a real short zipper sound. So check this out. You got to follow what I'm saying because I'm going to tell you something complicated. They play this podcast to you on Mountain Lion. Just blasting it. This is real.

I'm not joking, man. 80 decibels. 80 decibels. And they got a radio. They already got it collared. They got a radio collar on it. So they can tell at what point it spooks from human voices. At what point it runs off.

Then they go in right away. And re-catch it with dogs. And harass it a little bit. Then you'll go into the future. And see like. Did that experience. Of human voices. Cause it to.

Want to keep its distance. The fact that you're. Playing human voices. And then harassing it with dogs can you can you sort of like train the cat to move away and not want to be around human voices jim heffelwanger wrote in about how if you played the show open where you can hear a tree falling that he feels that that would speak particularly well to the mountain lion. Yes. Who's not going to like that sound up in a tree. Well, the thing is, is that when they hear our podcast,

the mountain lion is still on the ground. It's not when it's up on a limb. Yeah. Right? But even then, mountain lions spend a lot of time in the woods, almost all the time. And so I guess depending on what habitat they live in. But even then, the sound of a falling tree might be alarming to a mountain lion.

But you say they calculated that then and they only play, they skip ahead. Yeah, I think, yeah, Bart mentioned something about that. Yanni suggests they don't even play the ads to them. Because they don't want to like encourage consumerism. Yeah, and mountain lions. Cougars. play the ads to them because they don't want to encourage consumerism. Yeah. And mountain lions. Cougars. Yeah, they're probably... He also sent in a sign that he took a picture of.

Do you want to read the sign? Yeah, but I don't really understand the sign. It's a real sign. British Columbia. British Columbia Parks. Looks like they put it up. It's a warning sign and it says,

very large letters, Cougar in Area. Then a little bit smaller letters. Please stay on trails. Travel in small groups and do not capitalize, do not allow men under 30 to travel alone.

That's a statement on men under 30. But gals can go right ahead. Yeah. If you're a young female, have at it. And I guess he even said like under 14, but like what? Maybe there's a particular disposition generally. They're flighty? About it or irresponsible maybe.

I think that's trying to protect men under 30 from themselves. Yeah, from poor decision making. That is a weird answer. Are you guys missing the joke here? Cougar is another name for an older woman. Oh! We're totally missing the joke.

Holy cow, Phil. Oh my god, we're so dense. God, Phil is smart. Hevelfinger now is probably upside down in his chair listening to this. You know, Hevelfinger's always sending us stupid-ass jokes that I don't realize are jokes. Yeah, god, Jim. You really screwed this up. Oh god, we didn't...

Dude, don't send subtle jokes, man. I like like a... We're so dense. That's good, Phil. I mean, i don't think it's that good i think it's just this is mostly embarrassing for you guys very embarrassing holy cow man dude i need to you know what i need to go into a new line of work again this comes back to the different in age a difference in ages here because i used to partake in cougar jokes but it's been 20 years. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, it's outdated for sure. Oh, yeah. I'm too... I'm so... That shows how woke I am. There you go. I didn't get the joke. You've moved past it.

So you're saying cougars don't even exist anymore? I mean, people probably still use the term but it's not in the main... I mean, there's a whole show called Cougar Town. That was like the peak of it. It's about mountain lions. Older women. Yeah, exactly.

No, it was about Courtney Cox looking for men under 30. But now. Oh, man. Dude, that is probably the most embarrassing thing. Yeah. I got half mind to edit that whole thing out and make it that I got the joke. Okay. Hey, you know what?

Let me do. Yeah, let's patch it in right now. Oh, let me say this. Okay. Then you patch this in and be like, I'm going to say, oh, Y Hey, you know what? Let me do... Yeah, let's patch it in right now. Oh, let me say this. Okay. Then you patch this in and be like, I'm going to say, oh, Yanni, you obviously don't get the joke. No. It's about older women.

Okay, put that... Prowling for younger... Prowling for young... There you go. Put that all in there. Got it. You'll patch that together, right, Cole? Of course, yeah.

Thank you. We're losing Ted. Ted's lost us. Well, we're going to come find him. I'm good. We're going to come find him in a minute. We had a correction to do. We were talking about sexing chicks.

Chickens. Sexing baby Sexing baby chickens. And I was saying that with the increased popularity of backyard poultry raisin of which ian is a participant um people go out and they buy birds and then then they are often surprised they buy chickens to lay eggs and they're often surprised to find that

that one day it wakes up in the morning and goes right and i was talking about how um i felt that there was some issue where it was extremely difficult to sex chicks, ins, young chicks, young chickens. Right. And a guy, a poultry guy from a poultry grower in Delaware says it's really not that. Commercial poultry grower. Check this out. He says, male chicks have even feather follicles at the edges of their wings, whereas females will have notably long and short feather follicles.

He says this strategy is pretty spot on. There's also vent sexing, which Brant showed us with ducks, where you squeeze the feces out of the chick, which opens up the chick's anal vent, called the cloaca, slightly, allowing the chicken sexer to see if the chick has a small bump which would indicate that the chick is a male now you can if you

want to sex a duck you can open that cloaca up and it looks like a little worm in there like an inside out worm or a worm like a little wormy structure in there. Like an inside out worm or a worm? Like a little wormy structure in there. Okay. And that when engorged with blood that's the second time engorge has been used in reference to cloacas on this show. And this year.

Yeah. Engorged with blood you can tell that it's a male or female. Did you know that Yanni? I did not. Why would you, are there certain duck species that the males and females look the same from the outside? Or do you kill an immature?

That's what it is, you kill an immature one. Ted, do you know about this? You know, I don't, but I was just thinking that it's hard to sex beaver too. You know, I think the organs are internal. We actually rehabbed one.

Can be done. When you skin them, you know, right off. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but yeah, but that's kind of intrusive. You know, put them up on the old camp. It often leads to, it often leads to mortality events.

We rehabbed one for six or seven months and it got to be kind of onerous and we didn't know if it was a boy or girl. You took care of a baby beaver. We did. I, you know, I, I, at that time I was teaching at Murray State and, um, some, um, I went into class one day and there was a big box in there, a cardboard box. And I, I go, what's this? And they said, uh, it's a beaver. I thought it was a joke. Like, oh, okay, sure. I'm game. I opened it up and it really was. It was a kit beaver. And there had been some

frat guys out there, I think blowing up dens or something. I'm not sure. I don't, you know. And so there was this one kit that had survived all of that. And these sorority girls, I don't know if they were AOPI, maybe Alpha Gams, Tri-Sig, I'm not sure. But anyway, the sorority girls, not important. Is that relevant? No. Give them a shout out. Anyway, they brought the baby beeper in. I went, what am I going to do?

And so I write it down. I would think I was lecturing that day on Mesopotamia. And every time I'd pause talking about irrigation, I would go, meh. And I would go, and they'd go, oh. And so I said, okay, we're going to take it home. So we took it home and we bottle raised it. It's kind of like, remember the guy Archibald, what was his name? He thought he was, he passed himself off as an Indian.

He called himself Gray Owl. The only Archibald I know is Rutledge. And so, yeah, we rehabbed this beaver for a while. But, you know, we had an understanding landlord. But, you know, after a while, you got to start replacing doors and, you know, we had an understanding landlord, but, you know, after a while you got to start replacing doors and we start, you know, replacing table legs and. So the beaver chew that stuff up. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, the teeth, they grow all the time. So they got to, but, but we never knew if it was a boy or girl. That's the point. Yeah. You know, back to the, well, but we didn't know if it was a boy or girl. So we just called it baby, baby beaver. Then he got to be less a baby. And so it was pretty good in a speckle

where it went bacon over the top with, no, I'm just kidding. You turned loose. We found a beaver rehabber up in northern part of Kentucky and then took it up there. And, um, hopefully it stayed out of, you know, 330 kind of bears. Hmm.

Beaver always shine. Speaking of beaversvers we had another correction some people like real riled up that i screwed this up so i was saying how snares used to be snares then they got rebranded as cable restraints i was wrong uh a cable restraint has a relaxing lock on it i thought like a relaxing lock was a snare with a like what kind of lock it's a relaxing lock on it. I thought a relaxing lock was a snare with a what kind of lock? It's a relaxing lock on a snare. No, very big difference. Very big difference for you people out there who care tons about snares.

A snare is a, when they're using the term snare, they're talking about a dispatch, a kill type trap. A cable restraint. Because the mechanism never relaxes and Never relaxes. And every time it moves,

it just cinches tighter and tighter. And you'd rig it up so that, you'd rig it up, you know, so that there's like entanglements, you know, you might like rig it to a tree and wrap around the tree and tighten up and kill it. But they're saying a restraint is rigged different,

different lock. You don't have, you don't have any kind of impediments around it that might cause it to get tangled up, and it's rigged very much to keep the thing alive. Cave restraints, folks. I thought it was interesting that the one guy wrote in from somewhere in the desert southwest as a trapper, and he said that it's very important for them to use them, not because they like, you know, for some sort of animal welfare, but because in their conditions, if they use a kill snare,

they can lose that animal in a matter of hours. But if it's kept alive, then they can dispatch it. And when I say lose the animal, like they would lose the hide because of the hot conditions. So they use that type of snare so that it preserves the hide. You want to know something else that guy said? He said, I would be

lying if I said I wasn't a little disappointed that a fellow trapper wouldn't know the difference. But we will forgive you on this one. Kent. Here's a good story. Krim was telling me about.

Someone sent this to us. There's a guy in Maine. This is a real conundrum. I don't have an opinion. Yeah, I don't know either. Real conundrum. A guy in Maine builds a house float. Basically, it's like a shed on a raft.

I mean, it's pretty sweet looking. You could sleep in it. With a rooftop. He builds a raft, puts a shed on it. In Southeast Alaska, they're everywhere. This is not there, though. But this is where it gets rich. Builds a raft, builds a shed

on it so you can hang out and sleep in there. Puts a little upper deck on there with a cable railing for a deck. Brings it out to the local lake and says, hey, you're allowed to take a boat wherever you want and anchor it.

And just moves into it. Much to the consternation of people that live around the lake. Other houses on the lake don't seem to bother them, but they are very perturbed that this guy is living on their lake in his raft shed. His argument is that,

show me where I'm not allowed to anchor a boat anywhere I want. It's public water. I don't have an opinion about it. Yeah. Kind of rooting for the guy me too but then he says one person says how he docked up a few hundred feet for their house and spent the whole summer out there partying and he has a lot of people he's a partier? Oh, yeah. He parties. No, but someone claimed he had like 31 people in and out that day. And he said he had never had more than, I think, a couple. And he said anyone on the lake is welcome to come out, bring their kids, and jump off the roof. It's open to anyone to party. They say he can have as many as 16 boats tied up to it at once,

but I don't know what the hell kind of boats they're talking about. He says that's not true. Anyways, they're going after him. They're trying to pass an ordinance now about mooring. I don't have an opinion about it. Now, I grew up on Little Lake. If someone anchored up on Little Lake. If some... Yeah. If someone anchored up off my mind... If someone, it's okay.

But if all of a sudden there was a hundred... I'd say as long as the guy doesn't have a stereo going like 12 hours a day. Yeah, but what if there's a hundred? All of a sudden you can't go water ski because there's too many float houses. Oh, sure. You think this guy will attract a bunch more people. Like it'll catch on with their floating sheds. Think about it.

You can't afford the house that's on the shore because it's a million bucks, but you can build yourself a little house float for, I don't know, 50K? I'm guessing you could do pretty good. Corinne likes the... Oh, he's got you could do pretty good. Corinne likes the... Oh, he's got it on pontoon floats. Corinne likes his little shed. Show Ted. I think it's pretty cool.

All right. It's like Ted Kaczynski. It's like Ted Kaczynski's place on floats. It's a real conundrum, man. Do they mask? Are they socially distant? I do not know. They don't get into that level of detail,

and they don't get into waste disposal. Ellsworth, Maine. I'm sure he's got a composting toilet. If you live near Ellsworth, Maine, I would go out and party with this gentleman, quietly party with this gentleman, so he doesn't get in more trouble. He's got kids out there with him.

If I was living out there, I might think about quickly building one myself, getting it out there, because then you'd be grandfathered in. Get out there now. Yeah. Once they make those rules, nobody else. You'll have one of the two. Because you have a wood stove. Oh, dude, it'd be a great idea.

You're there. Another correction, which I don't feel like getting into, but I want to talk about the nature of the correction. Yeah, that's, yeah. So this whole German, if you've been listening to the show, this whole people just bickering about attributes of obscure German hunting dog breeds. Oh, my God. They wear me out, man.

Yeah. It's basically between German wire hair pointers and a dog that's called a drawthour. I believe is how you pronounce it. Yeah. It's like, well, actually, the drawthour has 13 beard hairs upon birth. The German wire hair ranges from 9 to 11 beard hairs. Ron, are you hearing this? It's like, oh my God, it never ends, man.

Ted, you ever had a bird dog? I have not. Our next-door neighbors had a Weimaraner, and it howled all the time. Whenever there'd be a siren in Orlando, there would be a lot of sirens. And my father would go out in his underwear and spray the hose across the ligustrum hedge and try to quiet the dog down. And the lady, her name was Irene.

We'll leave the last name anonymous. But she saw my dad out there in his undershorts spraying the hose and didn't realize that that was my dad. And so she called my mom and said, Myra, I don't want to scare you, but there's a man outside in his underpants. And she goes, thank you, Irene. Frank, get in here. But it was a Weimaraner. Are they bird dogs? I believe so.

I'm not sure. Well, I mean, I was like, oh, why? I don't know. Why, Miranda? I'll get a little. But Ronnie does have, Ronnie Bang does have one. And his correction, which, you'll just have to explain it next time you're on, Ronnie. But he does have one thing.

They never do. See, back to this sharpness and hardness test. There's some debate amongst the German hunting dog community about whether this is fact or fiction about making your dog duke it out with various small mammals various mid-sized mammals ronnie points out that the sharpness these are sharpness tests or hardness tests you never do it on a test day it's separate from a test day but he goes on to say this. The fox part is in the test. So Danielle, oh, here's the other update.

The dog, you know how Danielle's donating the dog to our auction house oddities, which started this whole? Yep. That dog's now pregnant. What do you call it when you're pregnant and they put that little wand over your belly? Sonogram? Ultrasound?

Ultrasound. Hold on. The mother of the puppy that was going to be auctioned off or the puppy that was going to be auctioned off is already pregnant? No, no, no, no, no. The dog that will birth the puppy that we will auction off in the auction house of oddities. The way you just said it, you're making it sound like a puppy was pregnant. No. Irish puppy. What was that old joke? Irish twins? Anyhow.

What was I getting at? Oh, the dog's pregnant. The puppy's down its way. There's at least five of them in there. They did an ultrasound on the dog. And that guy's talking about all this german dog stuff which i like but ronnie goes on to say this here's the test that they do that involves a dead fox okay you get yourself dead fox tie it to a cord give that cord to a judge. The judge then drags the fox 200 meters.

You can tell we're talking about European stuff because it's in meters, not yards. Drags the fox 200 meters and leaves it behind a rail or a corral of sorts. Drag the dead fox all around, put it in a corral. The dog gets there by nose, whichnie says is not a big deal but what is a big deal is the dog has to jump into the corral grab the dead fox out of there jump out and return it to their owner handler that test is referred to as the fox in a box. And he goes on to say, true shit there. So no doubt someone will write in

to tell us how that's not actually true. Right. And I think maybe we need to... That sounds like some Dr. Seuss shit. Actually, that should be another shirt. We should make yet a new shirt. Fox in socks in a box? Dude, the macro fructification t-shirt is coming along nicely.

It's going to be like 100. What are you waving off? Oh, Ted again is wondering what we're talking about. It doesn't matter because that's the last thing and now we're getting back into it. I know, but I'm saying I was just like waving him off as in like the Macto. I can't pronounce it. Well, I've got a question, Steve, because you've been saying it more correctly. Are we getting, do the t-shirts have the incorrect word on it?

Macro fructation? Or do they have the real one, which was macro fruitification? What would be a better t-shirt would be the email chain of people arguing about this. Okay. I eventually. What was the consensus? My role here, my role here at the company

allows me to have final say on certain things. And I, and one of those things was what this t-shirt would say on it. I felt that I was so close to right

that I wanted to have the right word so the shirt is a collection of beautiful mushrooms a sketch of a collection of beautiful mushrooms and it says simply macro fructification not macro fructation because the problem is it's so my bad word my wrong word was so close to the right word that it's not really like it's not that funny anymore and Brody even agreed

he's like then it just is confusing yeah but there's only like a hundred of these shirts we're gonna sell them they'll be gone in an instant

oh they will be we'll need to do and then we'll do Fox in a Box has it been has it been designed yet oh yeah sharp looking shirt

okay I was gonna make a suggestion there's only 99 available because I Okay. There's only 99. I was going to make a suggestion. There's only 99 available because I want one. Oh, that's too bad. We'll need to make more. I think the demand for that will be high. Oh, no, I'm wrong. It's 144.

Hmm. Because they sell them by the dozens, apparently. Oh, okay. Eggs, traps, and apparently t-shirts are sold by the dozen. Okay. Will we get more in if we get sold out quickly? No, it's a one-off. Oh.

It's a one-off. What's the price on these? About a few hundred bucks. Stack of hotcakes. I guess I'll hold off. You know what I feel like there's a lot of demand for and we should do again since we're on the talking t-shirts is a Blouksh t-shirt. Yeah.

Rip off 144 of those buggers. Fox in a box is going to be a sweet shirt. I think we need to do that. It'll be Ronnie. And Flip Flops. In flip-flops? Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join.

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Yeah, great I'm glad I came up from Kentucky To hear about all this But that's good Because I've never been to Montana I've never been this close to Canada Like I wanted to sing Maybe have some Neil Young angst or something

Yeah, no, you're essentially in Canada right now Daryl Hannah, maybe. She's been to Canada. I've seen Gordon Lightfoot twice live. Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah, but he had a great guitarist back in the 60s, Red Shea, great acoustic guitarist.

He did like the, if you could read my mind, the guitar parts. If you could read my mind. Steve, I'm reading your mind, man. I'm reading it. Tell us what a longhunter was. Yeah, a longhunter was a professional hunter that crossed the Alleghenies. They crossed the Blue Ridge.

They came from western Virginia, western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee. They supplanted the Indian in the deer skin trade. And it could be either seasonal, you hunt deer, or it could be year-round. You could also, like Boone did, by the second or third frost, you start trapping beaver. And then as the season rolls around again, you kind of switch off. And by April, May, you're killing deer again. But yeah, it was a, they're kind of like the forerunners to the mountain men.

But of course the mountain men, their number one quarry is what? The Rocky Mountain Trappers wanted what? Beavers. Yeah. And for the long hunter, the number one quarry was the. White-tailed deer.

Yeah, white-tailed deer. And in both cases, fashion drove it. And it was male fashion. Male fashion? Male fashion. I mean, women, you know, they had some deer skin dresses, I guess, and whatever. But, yeah, it was breeches, saddles, shoes, gloves, the fancy yellow pumps you wanted to wear when you went ballroom dancing. And they were taking out deer literally by the

They were making like pump shoes with deer hide? Yeah. Typically dyed yellow. Yeah, it was a huge industry in London. You know, London was actually one of the global centers of whiteitetail deer processing. Is that right, really? Yeah, and it was a cottage industry.

There was a number of tanneries, of course, in the American colonies as well. And it was kind of ad hoc. It wasn't as well bureaucratized, is that a word, as, say, like the Hudson's Bay Company, which begins in 1670. And that really is well, smoothly oiled. And, you know, you had a kind of a peck order of who's going to control it. You had- Meticulous record keeping.

Yeah. And they even had like, it was unionized, like gilded. And you even had laws as far as like height requirements. You had weight requirements, religious requirements. You could, it was like in your contract, you had to pause every hour and smoke your pipe. It would be fine. And let the voyagers sing and the courrier des bois.

And, you know, you had. Really? It's like those French Canadian beaver trappers, the guys had like union rules. It was in their contracts, man. Every hour we can stop and sing our chanson. And I don't know what they sang. I used to, you know, Alouette. Oh, yeah. I'll tell you exactly what they used to sing.

I grew up in Michigan, man. We studied all this stuff. Yeah. That's right. Alouette, jante, alouette, alouette. Paddle your canoe along. We studied this stuff hardcore for some reason. Yeah, but you never had anything like that with the mountain, excuse me, with the long hunters.

And there was never any, like with the Rocky Mountain trappers, you know, you would have your Emanuel Leases and your John Jacob Astors and people that really hit the jackpot and became. And you never really quite had that with the long hunters. But ultimately, there's. pot and became and you never really quite had that with the long hunters but ultimately there that's an interesting point you're bringing up that um not only it's like so decentralized but right like america's first millionaire was a guy that got involved in the beaver trade but i never thought about that that with all this like in that boone era of the whitetail hunters you didn't they weren't like producing millionaires. At least not ones we know today.

Yeah, that's true. Well, was he the first millionaire? I thought it was George Washington, but he did it on land. No, I thought Astor was America's first millionaire. Maybe I'm wrong. Crint can find out for us. When you get off at Astor Place in New York, the subway station, Astor Place subway station, there's beavers in the tile work.

Wow. Yeah. Oh, yeah. There's beavers in the tile work of the subway station in New York at Astro Place. I spent so much time in that subway station. You were looking the wrong way. Yeah. Wow.

Okay. You were facing out watching the rats down in the little track area. That's what I used to like. Just standing there and watching those rats running around. Well, that was the big money area. You had the Dutch there. And the beaver and the Bible just kind of are really critically important to the settlement

of America, particularly the beaver in that area. And so, yeah. What were the years when the long hunters like Boone were most active in their hunting? Yeah, it's really short. You really could kind of sandwich it in between like the very end of the French and Indian War, 1762, 1763, right in there to about the very beginning, the first salvos of the American Revolution. If you're going to put that in movie terms, think like from the last of the Mohicans to the Patriot, like right in there, you have the long hunter period. And the real heyday really is quite brief and it's fairly well defined from about 1769 to about 1772, 73. So, I mean, it's a tiny span.

Now, you always had market hunters. Four years. Yeah. Well, I mean, when you start drawing delineations like that, you're going to get people that, no, that's not right. You always had market hunters and market hunting. I mean, that goes back a long ways. But as far as like the classic period of 1768, 69, that's when you had the big fur brigades coming in that weren't, Boone wasn't necessarily part of that. Boone hunted far more solitary, which is brothers, brother-in-law, you know, kith and kin, that kind

of thing, a few neighbors for camp tenders. But you had guys like James Knox coming up from the New River Valley of Virginia. And Knox comes in with 22, 23 men. And, you know, they sometimes. Engaged in deer shooting. Like 23 guys going to hunt whitetails. Yeah. And they're each bringing in, and these are pack horsemen. These aren't guys coming in little backpacks. They're not out there just trekking around.

They're coming in and bringing in each two to three pack horses each with all their traps and so forth. And these are hand forged double long spring traps. And that's the difference too in the Indian method. The Indians are hunting the fur bearers. You know, they're gigging them, they're shooting them. Well, whites were trapping them. And this uh, this is when you really have the development of, uh, like the long spring trap, the double long spring trap. Um, but they're hand forging them before you have, you know, like Oneida and Victor,

those kind of folks. So they were equally trappers as much as they were hunters. They could be, you know, I think Boone and people tend to overlook this. I think Boone was addicted to beaver trapping. Throughout his life, almost to the very end, he would still go out there and trap beaver. Yeah, they talk about trap beaver and otter in the wintertime.

And beaver, again, it was the fashion that drove it, and particularly in Europe, because the European beaver was pretty well trapped out by the 1600s. And so, you know, wanting to wear a beaver fur-filled hat, you can even read about them in Chaucer and Shakespeare. And so it was a really a cultural thing. So that really drove the beaver industry. And of course, by 1840, if you talk about the Rocky Mountain Travers, that's when you have the fashion switch to silk, and that ends that. But that's really a thriving dynamo during Boone's period as well, the beaver fur felt hat, and then the deer skins. And so, yeah, you could be seasonal, just go for the deer, and typically it would be about from April through about the second or third frost. They wanted the deer skins. I'm talking about the actual skin,

when the skin was thin because of the tanning processes of the day. They weren't using big chemical tanning vats. If you got the skins tanned and you could, they had three different levels of skin gradation. You could get them grained. That meant that they were fully processed, tanned, ready to go. And that could be either if you got them through the Indian trade, a brain tan, or through the white trade, typically an oak tan of some type. Or they were even using salt alum. Or you could get them half-dressed.

That meant that you, and this is what Boone and those guys are doing, the long hunters were half-dressing the skins, meaning that they would go out, you know, they shoot the deer, they de-hair it like with a courier knife or a, what do they call them? A draw knife? A draw knife, yeah. And then they whip it over a staking board until you break down the epidermal layer. And then you would get about 50, and you could fold them up, and you would put them in a bear skin. And so they were typically wrapped in bundles of 50.

And like when the long hunters would go out, they'd go out oftentimes in a team. Like Knox, I said he'd go out 23, 24 guys. That's a lot of guys with horses. And they would have a big base camp where they meet about every two weeks. And then they would establish small, what would refer to as out camps. We would think of them like little satellite camps. And even Boom, when they first go to Kentucky the first time, they had a base camp. And then they would have about six or eight satellite camps.

And you would team up. It'd be, you know, Steve and Giannis. They go out, and hopefully they don't get mad about something. They hunt and do their thing. And then every two weeks, they bring them back to the camp, and they would wrap them up in deer. Excuse me. They would wrap them up in bear hides, and they would put them up in deer, excuse me, they would wrap them up in bear hides and they would put them up on scaffolds. You know, typically log scaffolds about 8 to 12 feet off the ground because of what?

To keep stuff out of them. Yeah, like what? Bears. Yeah, bears, wolves, right. And a lot of times, too, they would put dried buffalo hides, they would stretch those over the top, like a hairy piece of plywood or something, because. For rain? That would be part of it.

You would, you know, tilt it and kind of deflect the rain, but it would also keep the buzzards out because the buzzards would land in and they would claw into them as well. Gotcha. So yeah, there was all kind of, I mean, it was a, it was a hazardous enterprise. It was, it was extremely hard. It was arduous.

You know, people tend to look at these folks like, you know, like the Daniel Day-Lewis type or something. Now, you know, these are hardworking guys. There's a lot of ways to die out there. The business itself is very, very hard. You can lose your profits either through, you know, rain, maybe a bear claws into it. Things are stolen like by the Indians. And that happened to Boone several times, you know, particularly like in his first big long hunt to Kentucky in 1769 to 1771. Boone's robbed two or three times by Indians. He goes back after being on the trail, literally from May of 1769 to May of 1771, he goes back to the Yadkin Valley to Rebecca and goes, well, we're broker than when I left. Yeah. He had two small fortunes stolen from him on that trip, right? Yeah. But he had seen Kentucky and he knew the way in and he had explored it more than any white man in the settlements.

And so that's kind of paves the way, you know, whether providentially or by chance or however people want to interpret that for Boone, what, you know, he becomes the great icon, you know, the first true frontier hero. Can you explain real quick, just to back up a little bit, when you talk about that short period, that short heyday of long hunters, right? So these are like Hero. Can you explain real quick, just to back up a little bit. When you talk about that short period, that short heyday of long hunters. Right. So these are like hunters that would do these months long, maybe years long trips over the Appalachians. What do you say from where you're from?

Do you go Appalachians? I Appalachian. Oh, you do? Okay. It's like New Orleans and New Orleans. I mean, it depends on where you're from. Yeah. Appalachians fine. Blueachian. Oh, you do? Yeah. It's like New Orleans and New Orleans. I mean, it depends on where you're from. Yeah, Appalachian's fine. Blue Ridge, we probably, you know.

Over the Blue Ridge. Yes, that's more old-timey. So it's a very fine, it's a very short period. What was it about the French and Indian War that allowed it to open up? Was it that the American colonists had displaced the French out of those areas and that's what allowed the long hunters to start hunting in there? Well, it ended. That's what happened.

I mean, you know, you have the British. So like the bloodbath ended. Yeah. By 1762, 1763, you have the end of the French and Indian War and you have relative peace that's established. And the British established the Treaty of 1763, which ostensibly is to keep the colonists out from the West. Nobody paid much attention to that. But you had the Peace of Paris

done in London and Paris, and that ended the Seven Years' War. And so it was wide open. So relative peace was established with the Indians, particularly the Algonquins that inhabited the land west of the Blue Ridge. But also the French agreed to not, you know, their land had been usurped. The British gained a huge amount of territory. They gained Louisiana, you know, or at least the Spanish did,

and the British were possessors now of the Ohio Valley. The Ohio Valley was like the big plum. You know, you had the French coming in from the West, and then you had the British who had established colonies along the Tidewater, and everybody's kind of fighting for the great lakes. And so once that period is settled, then it's open and you can get in there without worrying so much about an arrow in the back. Yeah. Those wars, like both the, both the American Revolution and the French Indian War were

like horribly bloody on the frontier. Yeah. I mean, just like the atrocities you read about that aren't widely known. Oh man, just brutally. Well, just take the American Revolution, for example. Most people think, and you, whether you're

listening to a television broadcast or you're reading a book, they go, well, you know, Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington in October 1781. That's the end of the American Revolution. Well, it was in the east, but it certainly was not out west. And by out west, I mean Kentucky. Kentucky. That was, you know, the far west.

And so that war continued, the American Revolution, for another year and a half. And it's far more catch-as-catch-can. You don't have manual-of-arms training. You're treeing, meaning you're getting behind trees. You're fighting Indian style. There's no rules of war. There's no real rules of engagement. You have Indian allies that are both coming out of the Great Lakes that are being still supplied by the Brits up there in Detroit and so forth. And you have now a lot of French partisans

that are part of that as well. And you even had some ranger units from the British, Butler's Rangers. I mean, these guys were tough. They were kind of like the British equivalent of the American, an earlier counterpart, Rogers Rangers. So yeah, it was bloody. It was brutal. But it was just how life was. It's inconceivable to most of us today. And that's the thing. If you read the first biography of Boone, John Filson's book, President's State of Kentucky, it's got a biographical account of boone and one thing about it is how incredibly dark and brooding it and bloody it really was uh yeah i know we're talking about we talked about this a couple times the you see him when you watch the old frontiersman movies or watching boone stuff you know he'll take

his rifle out and split a bullet on a hatchet whatnot right like what do you call he called his gun tick licker right because he could shoot a tick off i've done i've done that you can do that it's not a it's not an impossible fee i've done it but how accurate could these guys have really been because think about all the inconsistencies. The powder's inconsistent. Like these guys are making their own powder or buying it. Yeah.

You're not measuring grains because it's different combustibilities. Like how good could they have been? Are there any real, like, are there any real assessments of how good they were with these rifles? Like how far could they shoot a deer? Well, probably the most famous long shot, and it wasn't a deer. It was a British officer.

It was a sure shot Timothy Murphy who shot a British officer at about 225 yards. They were just sitting out there on the horses and the American Revolution. And Murphy came out there and kind of like maybe licked the front sight, like the old Sergeant Alvin York movie, I don't know, and put his gun in a crock of a tree and leveled down. And these Britishers were like, what's he going to do? And he killed him. And then he killed the guy next to him. That's around 220 yards. Typically, most folks aren't shooting at that kind of range, but these men really knew their guns. I mean, they lived with their guns. This was a drill bit. This was a hammer. This was their tool, not only of their occupation, like in the case of Boone, but it was a survival tool that you had to know your gun

to stay alive. And there's one account of a rare war officer, Daniel Broadhead, who encounters a number of Samuel Brady's men. Brady was a scout. Little is really written about him. He's in his own way kind of an unresolved Indian hater. His family was killed by Indians. He had these men with him like Louis Wetzel who were just really dangerous and scary. But Broadhead comes across Brady's men, and they challenge them to a shooting match. And Broadhead men are all using muskets and, and,

uh, Brady's men's are using, uh, long rifles and they put a keg out there about 70 or 80 yards. Can you tell us the difference between a long rifle and a musket? Sure. Uh, a musket is a smooth bore.

There, it's like a shotgun. Okay. Like a tube. And, uh, a rifle has rifling in the barrel. Like there are grooves and lands.

And that was actually done by the Germans in around 1550, 1560. And it was really incidental. It had nothing to do with accuracy in the very beginning. That hadn't, it was kind of a fix on how do we fire these guns and keep the black powder from smudging the barrel afterwards? Because black powder, once you fire it, it's hygroscopic. It absorbs moisture. And so after you shoot it a few times, particularly with a smoothbore, you know, it can really clunk up a barrel because, you know, there's no place for the fouling to go, the soot.

And so the Germans just cut grooves in the barrel, straight grooves, and to keep the, so the fouling could go into the grooves. And so they did that and they were like, wow, these sure shoot a lot better. And then they spiraled a few of them and they're like, wow, they really shoot better. And so accidentally they figured out from rifle, that's where rifling came from. So I rifling. That's one of the things I heard, I don't

know if it's true or not, is that the spiraling came from just wanting to increase the, the, how much groove you could have. Like you could have more surface area of groove by cutting spirals. And then therefore house more burnt powder. And then they hit on that idea that the bullet was spinning nice and shooting accurate.

I don't even know where the hell I read that. Yeah, that may very well be. I mean, I know guys even now that really like straight rifled guns. You know, they're called straight rifles. They'll have their barrels rifled, but instead of grooving them, they'll have them cut straight. Yeah, but it doesn't throw a spin on it.

Well, but you have kind of, you could either say the best of both worlds or maybe the worst of both worlds. I mean, it still functions very much like a rifle. If you want to use it for turkey hunting or something as a smoothbore, you can do that. Smoothbore, excuse me, straight rifles, straight rifling typically doesn't get shot out as readily as a, um, a, a spiral groove rifle. If you're shooting it, you can't take a spiral groove rifle and you shot in it. You know,

you're not going to put buckshot in it, or they had swan shot, they called it, or, uh, you know, number six or something, but a, a straight rifle, you can shoot shot. You can, any, any size shot, they called it, or, uh, you know, number six or something, but a, a straight rifle, you can shoot shot. You can, any, any size shot, number eight, buck shot, double, all the way up to, you know, so yeah, that's. So maybe the smoothbore was a little bit more versatile, a musket at that time, right? Yeah.

Yeah. That, that's a real astute comment because, yeah, they were, they were much more, if for a survival weapon, that's what you wanted, you know, because you can shoot shot, round ball up to that very size of caliber. And by the way, a lot of these frontiersmen, they were riflemen. But when it came time for, you know, you're talking about how bloody the Rev War was in the West and how bloody the F&I War was, the French and Indian War was. A lot of times when you got into woodland fighting like that, they left their rifles back home. They got the smooth

bores. At the Battle of Bluelix, August 1782. That's where Boone's son was killed, right? His second. One of his second sons. Yeah, the firstborn son, James, was killed when he was 16 by Indians in the

Powell's Valley area 1773. That's, man, we should get to that story later on. Oh, it's. It's a heartbreaking story, man. Absolutely. Tortured to death, fingernails all pulled out, killed. And then when Boone went back to find his body, oh.

Yeah, he goes back. Chokes me up. Sure, he goes back. Well, what happens? He goes back and they found the body. Initially, they did find the body. They knew where it was. There was four or five others killed, and they buried him.

But Boone did go back later to rebury him. To try to identify his boy. And the wolves had dug the bodies up. Right. And he recognized some wisps of hair. Right. That were his son's hair. Right. And he had brought a blanket from home. Yeah. That were his son's hair. Right.

And he had brought a blanket for home. And cradled, yeah, cradled the body for a while. And then he heard some Indians coming and slipped off into the night. Right. And he said it was the darkest day of his life. The most melancholy day. Yeah. And I'm getting show bumps talking about that.

Right. And again, that kind of thing just seems unfathomable to us. I mean, I might add, not only are you dealing with native intrusion, but, you know, he's right in the middle of a number of imperial wars, and they're being, they're allied with these imperial powers, and they're being armed. And so, yeah, it was just a tough time. Boone goes back and he buries his son and it comes a thunderstorm and he's out there and he hears a wolf howling. It's a thunderstorm and he just cradled his son's corpse. And the Indians are creeping up on him

and he gets in a canoe and kind of paddles with his hands and kind of quietly gets on down the creek and, and, um, manages to escape, you know, another, another close call. I don't know any one hunter, any one frontiersman in the history of the American frontier, uh, that was captured more times by Daniel Boone, by captured by Indians and. More times than Daniel Boone. Yeah. I mean, he was getting routinely captured, and I think a lot of times— Talking his way out of it. Yeah.

Yeah. Boone was—he had a really interesting attitude among Native people, and it goes back absolutely to his upbringing and his relationship with his mother and his relationship with his grandfather. But can you go back to that shootout first? The guys that are going to have the shooting tournament? What the hell is his name? Sure. SureShot.

Oh, no. Buckshot Roberts. What was his name? No. He was the guy that shot the— Yeah, SureShot Timothy Murphy was the guy that shot the British officer. And, you know, maybe it was just his time to go. I don't know how you look at that.

But, yeah, the- The two groups that ran into each other. Yeah, that's exactly. It was Daniel Broadhead, I believe, who was an American real war officer. I know I'm going to get all kinds of people correcting me later on some of this stuff. But he sees Samuel Brady's contingent of spies, they call them. They were scouts. We would call them scouts.

They were spies. Spies for the British. No, no, no, no. These are American guys. Okay. Yeah, I mean, these guys are dangerous. I mean, you know, you've heard of Rogers Rangers. Yeah.

Yeah, these guys were like Rogers Rangers, but much more freewheeling than they had a number of people that really had vendettas against Indians. And so, yeah, they put small rum kegs out there, you know, about the size, circumference-wise, of maybe a softball, 60 or 70 yards. And they're hitting it, in some cases, 100 times out of 100. And Broadhead had his musketeers. They had a few riflemen come out there and throw down on it. Not a one of them hit it. Yeah, so I mean, that's not perfect. But I mean, that does give you an idea.

They took a piece of paper, kind of a precious commodity, and put that out at about 40 or 50 yards. And the same kind of thing, every one of Brady's men either hit it square. I think they all hit it square. I think one guy nicked it. I think there were 13 of them. They all hit it square. One guy nicked it, a piece of paper about the size of, we might say, a silver dollar, out there about 50 or 60 yards.

And again, they brought in broadheads, men, and none of them hit it. So which was the crew of guys that were the spies that were out just like roaming around exacting revenge? That's Samuel Brady's men. They're called Brady's Rangers. Okay. I mean, they were... And they were rough characters. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. And like Louis Wetzel. I mean, Wetzel's one of these kind of guys that in some ways it's like the Greek could sort of raise to the pantheon of heroes.

In some ways, maybe not. Maybe he's like the anti-hero. His family was killed by Indians. He was captured himself as boy and wounded. And I had part of his breastbone shut off. He was about 12 or 13 years old. And Wetzel grew his hair long. It came down about to his calves.

Really? Yeah. And he would tie it up in long braids, long queues, and he would shake them at the Indians. Like Princess Leia. Yeah. They had that music then. And unlike Princess Leia, he did have his ears pierced. Maybe she did too, but he had silk red tassels in his ears.

But he would taunt the Indians. Kind of a striking looking character, huh? Yeah, he would just taunt them. He's like, come collect these. And there would be four or five Indians. And Wessel would take them on, just him. He would just charge come collect these. And there would be four or five Indians, and Wessel would take them on, just him. He would just charge right into them, four or five. And he'd shoot and take out one. I know this is insensitive to a lot of people. I'm not condoning any of this.

You know, it's a different time for a different era. I don't know, you know, mentality-wise, judgment-wise, we can't relate to what these people thought, how they dealt with these issues 225 years ago. I mean, whether it's imperial forces in your world, NATO allied forces, whatever. And so he would take out one. Well, of course, they run after him, right? And he would spit a ball down the barrel. He really had mastered the art of reloading on the run and probably had an enlarged touch hole. He would pour, a touch hole is the part of the

gun in the breech where the, you know, when you have a flintlock and the lock clashes and it hits the frisian, the flint hits the frisian and the flame jets through the touch hole. So he probably had an enlarged touch hole. So you would close the pan up until you, you butt the gun on the ground, the butt. Well, that, once you've got it loaded, you just butt the ground. It's, it's self primes. You spit the ball down without a patch.

Oh, like the powder that he poured in there would pour out and get into the, and get into the pan. Yeah. And see, he's, he's loading straight from the horn, like from the John, like in the John Wayne movies. I mean, nobody loaded straight from the horn

unless you just had to. Like a free-pour bartender. Oh, that's an important thing to mention because everybody thinks that you just free-poured from the horn. So how do they measure it? Yeah, okay. Typically, the care and tending of an American

long rifle later becomes known as the Kentucky What did you just say? American long. No, the care and tending. Care and tending American Law. No, the care intending. Care intending. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

It's just basically how to deal with a long rifle. And I would encourage listeners to go out and buy a flintlock. I got one. I tried to shoot some deer with it, but some would always go wrong every time I shot it. I don't know anything about your flintlock.

I didn't say that. Me neither. Anybody that's ever shot one can say the same thing. But yeah, get a good one. But yeah, learn how to operate that gun. You know, because the first thing you do is you'll buy a good flintlock. And then you'll go, well, I got to shoot it. And then you go like, well, how am I going to carry my powder?

Well, how do you carry your powder? Listen, man, we were idiots. We went to go to the Pennsylvania's Flint Locksies. Now, my buddies do it a lot. I didn't. So, like, I get one. How do you carry the powder? Carrying the powder horn.

Okay, so you do. You did. Okay, okay. That took three days. Yeah, people should do that. That will put them in touch with their forebears. It'll put them in touch with our subject. No, no, that's not.

I'm lying to you. I poured it into a, I had a powder horn, but I wanted to pour it into those little, like, looks like a little old style film canister. I poured it in there. Oh. Pre-measured. Yeah. Some people used to keep seeds in those.

Dude, a lot of deer had close calls on that trip, man. They don't even realize. Well, anyway, back to the care intending of an american get them on close calls part two the deer the american long rifle hair intending yeah i mean you you have a powder horn yeah suspended on whatever side is most comfortable we uh if your left hand or right-handed I have it on the right, you know, in the curl of the horn and all that. And yeah, you have a, on your shooting pouch strap,

you'll have a little piece of an antler, you know, it's a hollowed out deer tine that will be of a certain number of grains of powder. That's how they measured it. Yeah. And so you, yeah. Oh yeah. You, you measured the powder.

You, you measure the powder. You pour that down the muzzle. With that, you know how they would plug the horn with a piece of deer antler or like a wooden plug? Yeah. Would that be the measure or the measure hangs on your neck? No, no, no, no, no. Typically, yeah, they'd hand carve something. A fiddle peg was real popular.

A fiddle peg is kind of like ready to go. You just kind of whittle it down. But yeah, you take the horn and you pour into a measure and you already know because these guys live by their guns. Okay. And if any of your listeners can do the same thing, because they'll figure this out too. You know, you have, say like a, like I've got a, my rifle is 60 calibers. I shoot about 65 to 70 grains of powder. Okay. So I have a little deer antler that's hollowed out there, and I pour to that top, and I'll dump that down the barrel. Then you take a whatever size ball you're using.

Typically, you're going to be undersized by 10,000s, 12,000s, 15,000s. I mean, people that have shot these guns, you've got that all figured out. And you have a patch of linen, usually, and you have it oiled with bear fat. You know, bear, bear is like, makes about the best lube or, or whale. It's hard to get whale. These days. Yeah.

You just can't run down to like, you know, fast pro shop. I'm going, I need sperm whale oil. Like, where can I get that? And so, and then, yeah, then you ram it all down. You got a private. But you still now use bear grease as a lubricant? Yeah, always.

Where do you, do you get that at Sportsman's or? No, from Black Bears. Get that from the elusive. Yeah, I have friends from North Carolina. So you have some friends that hunt Black Bears and you ask them to. Yeah, I have friends from North Carolina. So you have some friends that hunt black bears, and you ask them to save them? Yeah, if you know any really, like, any hardcore North Carolinians that live, like,

in the area that we're talking about, they do about four or five things really well. They hunt bears. They make moonshine. They produce little North Carolinians, and they play music, and they make moonshine. I know I already said that. Man, that sounds like a Bear Grease podcast

episode. But they really like to do it. Yeah, you should, yeah, you should go down there. Yeah, and they always have that kind of stuff. And so, yeah, it is the best lubricant. So you have a grease patch of linen in your ball.

Yeah, be careful with that one. And yeah, yeah, it takes lead balls to shoot a flatlock. Got it. I got it. There's a joke in there? Oh, yeah, I get it. Yeah.

Okay. Boom. Okay. And yeah, so yeah, but, but you don't pour from the horn and you know, if it was a clutch situation, yeah. But I mean, you might have a spark down there in the breach. And if you're pouring directly from the horn, then you might have a two-pound grenade right by your head.

Oh. Yeah, like the John Wayne Alamo movies that look cool. I get it now. So you're saying like if there's something smoldering in there. Yeah. And you light that, and that powder falls down and ignites up the barrel and ignites that horn full of powder. And I think that's maybe whatever happened to the guy that invented black powder, because we don't know who he was. But I was wondering, how do you invent this?

The Sung Dynasty of China, you had some guy and he goes like, okay, I'm going to take 75 parts of a potassium nitrate, which they got that under outhouses and they've rendered the soil. And then 15% of willow ash and then 10% of sulfur. And then you, you know, you start, you get a mortar and pestle. Go, let's see what this does. Oh, sure, man.

You know, like he's spread over 17 provinces or something. And I know when Boone was, when Boone would make his own powder. Yeah. They would, there was some part of it, like they like to take the willow ash and they wetted it with their own piss.

You ever read that? Yeah. Something about the qualities of your own urine? Yeah. The qualities of urine were good? The way Boone did it, and a lot of folks did it, I mean, you know, we call the substance

saltpeter for reasons we won't maybe get into that, but they dug the soil up under what we would refer to today as an outhouse. In bat caves. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. What's that called?

Guano. Guano. And, uh, but they, yeah. And, and then you would get the dirt, soil, whatever, and you would like take, um, take like a sawhorse and invert it and the same basic idea and just fill it with hay, fill it full of hay. And it's just pour the mixture of the earth, guano, you know, whatever they, you know,

typically you're digging under the outhouse back in Kentucky and, um, you mix it with water, you pour it through there. And then you take the liqueur that is distilled from that and you'd boil that a little bit, an hour or so, and then let it sit. And as it evaporates, you'll have these crystals. That's potassium nitrate, saltpeter. And so you would take that and then you would take typically willow ash. They use other kinds of ash. And then sulfur would sometimes kind of get hard to get. But yeah, you would mix that together. You grind the ingredients separately, but then you would mix it together. And then typically they would use a human urine because it had a higher oxygen content. It would flash quicker. They've determined that. I don't know

how they determined that. And so, yeah, that was, but it was arduous. It was complicated. And very few people knew how to do it. And if you knew how to do it on the frontier, then you were quite a commodity. It's like blacksmithing. Again, that goes over our head. Most of us aren't blacksmiths, but Boone was also a very good blacksmith. So was his brother Squire. And Squire was also a great silversmith. And so, yeah, Boone was just a hunter and a trapper and had those talents. He had other talents as well, like just geared towards frontier living, not the least of which we were kind of getting into earlier, his dealing with the American Indians, you know, how he managed to get out of so many scrapes,

you know, how he learned his protocol, diplomacy, dealing with these folks. How did he learn that? Several ways. It goes back to his childhood. First of all, Boone was a Quaker, as his family were. His grandfather, George, came to America from England, made that transatlantic journey, like a lot of folks did. And he was a Quaker, you know, friend, as they called him, a society of friends, and lived in around present-day Burgeboro, Pennsylvania, donated a couple acres to the Quakers there and built a little church building.

I've been to that same church building a couple times. The original pews are all still there that the Boone family sat on. Are you serious? No, no, I sat on every one just to catch that vibe if I could. And, uh, and so Boone and his family were Quakers. Of course, they're pacifists, not a whole different kind of matter, but they had a number of Delaware converts. So, you know, Indians were nothing unusual to Boone. He worshiped with them in church. Uh, his grandfather also had a trading post, uh, George Boone, and he was, the Delaware hunters would come in.

And of course, you know, they're bringing in lush beaver pelts, otter pelts, perfectly processed deer hides, beautifully tanned, you know, brain tanned. And Boone intuitively is picking up on this. And he's, there's, the Delaware are closely related culturally and linguistically as Algonquin speakers to the Shawnee. So the Shawnee would be coming in there, and he's learning bits and pieces of the language, the patois. But he's also learning, maybe more importantly, how do you deal with these people? And he would carry this information throughout his life. He would tell his sons, you know, when you greet an Indian, be friendly, be frank, and give them gifts. I mean, literally, even if you can't afford it,

you give them, if it has to be, the shirt off your back. You know, if you have some bohi tea, you know, tea was a big deal, part of the China trade coming out of other parts as well, like India, Pakistan, so forth. Give them some tea. Give them some beads. Share something with them. Compliment them. Don't ever beat them in a shooting contest.

Give them some sugar. And this kind of diplomacy always served him well, and it served his sons well. And Boone understood. When he was in Kentucky, that first hunt, that first long hunt, and he's out there literally from about May to the 22nd of December, and they lay in hundreds of deer skins and quite a few fur bearers, primarily beaver. The Shawnees swooped down on them, Captain Will Emery, who would later capture Boone five years later, the lower blue licks, the saw boilers. And they take everything. And Boone understood,

you know, we would look upon it as theft. From the Indian perspective, they're taking what's rightfully theirs. You know, Boone was there breaking all manner of law. But this kind of diplomacy would serve him well. It would serve his sons well. Even his grandson, Albert Gallatin Boone, was a mountain man, full-fledged. And he's out there in the famous rendezvous of 1832. He's out there with Bridger and all these guys. But there were just Indian treaties that some people just couldn't clench.

And so they would bring in Albert Gallatin Boone. And just the name Boone to the Indians out west, like where we are, would resonate with them. Because they understood that that meant, you know, fair dealings, that you would be treated properly. And, you know, we were talking earlier about Samuel Brady and those guys. These are men of blood. You know, Ken, he's a scalp taker, a scalp hunter. And- Simon Ken. Simon Ken. Yeah, Boone, that was never Boone. You know, Boone did not revel in war.

He didn't glory in war. He was certainly a warrior when he needed to be. But he understood not only some maybe basic Indian language. I think actually he spoke Algonquin, Delaware, Shawnee probably pretty well. And he understood pipe ceremonies and so forth. But he understood just the basic diplomacy, gift giving. You know, you give somebody a gift, we think, okay, anniversary, whatever, give them a gift. For Native people, giving a gift meant burnishing that friendship. It's like a chain,

and if you let the chain get rusty, that's not good. But you give a gift that kind of brings back the glow, solidifies a relationship. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. And boy, my goodness, do we hear from the Canadians whenever we do a raffle or a sweepstakes. And our raffle and sweepstakes law makes it that they can't join our northern brothers get irritated well if you're sick of you know sucking high and titty there on x is now in canada the great features that you love and on x are available for your hunts this season the hunt app is a a fully functioning GPS with hunting maps that include public and crown

land, hunting zones, aerial imagery, 24K topo maps, waypoints, and tracking. That's right. We're always talking about OnX here on the MeatEater podcast. Now you guys in the Great White North can be part of it. Be part of the excitement.

You can even use offline maps to see where you are without cell phone service. That's a sweet function. As part of your membership, you'll gain access to exclusive pricing on products and services handpicked by the OnX Hunt team. Some of our favorites are First Light, Schnee's, Vortex Federal, and more. As a special offer, you can get a free three months to try OnX out if you visit onxmaps.com slash meet. onxmaps.com slash meet. Welcome to the OnX Club, y'all. Can you tell the story real quick of when Boone went on his first long hunt to Kentucky?

Yeah. He went with a couple guys, but wound up being alone for a year. Or close to it. And one of those guys, they never knew what happened to him. And he wound up, they found his skeleton like years later yeah inside a hollow tree like what the hell how did that work out well it didn't work out for him too well but yeah what happened was uh boone uh begins his first actual kentucky long hunt and may of 1769. He's led to Kentucky by John Finley, who he had met in 1755 during General Edward Braddock's ill-fated death march. Boone met Braddock. Boone was 21 years old.

Finley was about 12, 13 years older. And Boone witnessed that whole slaughter, huh? From afar, right? At Braddock? Oh, yeah. I mean, that's a whole different kind of episode. I don't know if you want to segue into that much, but yeah. I mean, Braddock, that was at the height of the French and Indian, that was before, that's the first salvo of the French and Indian-miraculous engineering feat. He builds a road from Maryland getting close to present-day Pittsburgh. You know, 110 miles, he's blasting routes. I mean, but yeah, they're trying to build a road to Fort Duquesne, the headwaters of the Ohio. You know, you have the Allegheny to the north, the Monongahela to the south. You have the Ohio River. There, you have the Allegheny to the north, the Monongahela to the south. You have the Ohio River. There's the French fort right there. And so, yeah, Braddock's men march in,

and Boone's part of that expedition. He's a wagoneer. He's part of the North Carolina militia. And he sees the bloodbath that ensues, and Boone escapes. He cuts the traces on his horse and takes off, and he learns several things. One, you know, you, manual of arms training does not work in woodland situation. Two, he learns the arrogance of not using native scouts. Don't, you know, the arrogance of not relying upon native intelligence, like for recon and military ops. Yeah. So that's where Boone meets Finley. Yeah.

And they decided to go on a big old hunting trip. Yeah, so Findlay comes back, you know, years later. So let's do this. And Boone, by this time, he's got seven or eight kids. He's 34, 35 years old. They've adopted another four from one of his brothers who dies. And he needs to hunt. Boone's about 34.

He's already been professionally hunting since he's 16. And so he goes into- Can I ask, I have a question about that. Yeah. You're talking about, it's such a hard life. It's such a hard way to actually even make any money. Were there no other options?

Like, had he not gone long hunting, he could have stayed back and- Sure. Just continue to be a blacksmith? And a farmer. And made a living and a farmer? Yeah, he was a very poor farmer. He didn't do well at it.

And as far as making a living on a blacksmith, yeah, maybe he could have done that. Why do you do what you do? It was a reason because, there was a reason just because like this is all that i have it's not because i'm really uh my personality dictates that i go on these adventures i think if you look at his history his early that's a great question if you look at his earliest history it was just he was drawn to the hunt it's a different, you know, we're trying to talk about the first long hunt, but if you look at his life, even when he goes to Missouri, you know, in 1799, he's 65 years old, a time when most people say, well, I'm going to kick back. And, you know, Boone fells a tulip

poplar about 60 feet long. They hollow it out into a giant dugout. He puts his wife and some of the children on that, grandkids, and send them down to Ohio. Imagine doing that nowadays. And then he and his, one of his sons, Nathan and some others, they walked to Missouri. And he begins, he starts life all over. And he basically is wide, you know, Missouri is Kentucky of old. You know, it's got lots of game, lots of land. The Indians are still wild and Boone's gets cat, gets captured now by Osage and other groups. But in the, in the first long hunt into Kentucky, yeah, they're at, Boone is there, uh, with, uh, his brother-in-law, John Stewart. That's who you're talking about, the guy in the log. And Boone's brother, Squire, will join him in about five or six months. He comes from North Carolina.

He's got to get the corn hung and he's got to get the hog slaughtered and so forth. But then he joins him. Then they have three neighbors that are helping them. But yeah, the Indians swoop down and capture these men and confiscate everything um and then later boone is hunting with stewart and uh stewart doesn't come back you know he just doesn't come back to camp at night he just doesn't come back to camp here they and uh and so boone there had been some flooding lots of lots of water and said well you know it's high water you can't get back to camp and so um several days elapse boone goes out and looks for him.

He finds a tree that's carved with Stewart's name and initials. And he says, oh, well, okay, he's been here, but it's kind of cryptic. He can't really figure out what happened. And he never knew what happened. And so when this happens, the camp tenders, they said, I've had enough. And they go. And Finley leaves. They go, like like between getting captured by

Indians and losing everything and then Stewart disappeared. And so it is five years later, like you say, when they're blazing the trail to the Wilderness Road that someone, one of the Axemen, hack

into a large hollow sycamore and they find a skeleton. What are the odds, man? Yeah. Well, again, it's an interesting time. It's a dark, it's incredibly violent. It's incredibly beautiful in its own way. I mean, you know, the game is like the Serengeti.

It's just, it's got that romantic side to it, but it's just incredibly violent. You hack into a tree and you find a skeleton and they call Boone because he's the leader of the axe team. Without that hole that was just made by this axe, where was the next closest hole in this tree for the body to get there?

They feel that he crawled in there wounded. Yeah. Because he hadled in there wounded. Yeah. Because he had broken bones. Yeah. So there was like a hole at the base of the tree. Somehow. I mean, I'd love to see that damn tree.

These are immense trees. You can read about the trees in that day. This is what was so appealing about Kentucky. Kentucky was like this big parkland. I mean, don't forget the geographic zone of Kentucky today. That wasn't Kentucky. Kentucky then would be like, just draw a triangle, like Louisville, eastward over to like Lexington, Frankfurt, that area, and then down to about present-day Berea. That's like the bluegrass.

That was Kentucky. And you had giant deciduous trees, tulip poplars. I mean, you would have five or six men that would camp in a tree over a season. They would camp in the tree. In some cases, they could even— What do you mean by camping in a tree? I mean, in the hollow tree. In some cases, you could even get the horse in there. Yeah.

And because of the native practices of, you know, now we're learning how valid this is, but they have practices that had gone on for hundreds of years of burning the grasses, you know, seasonally torching them to get rid of what we would say is secondary growth and gets rid of pests. And you can see for a long ways and look out for enemies. I mean, there's a lot of reasons why they would torch the prairie, the savanna, periodically. What it did is it cleared out the secondary growth, and then you had these large deciduous trees that would grow and grow and grow. And so when they would describe Kentucky, you can read John Filson's book on Kentucky that came out in 1784, The Discovery, Settlement, and Present State of Kentucky by John Filson. And he describes Kentucky like a vast meadowland.

And the word Kentucky, they think there's different interpretations. You know, you have people that think it's Iroquoian. It means dark and bloody ground. But the Algonquin translation is the great meadowland. And so you had these immense hollow trees. The soil was loose. Again, it means nothing for us to say, you could get there on the first day and plow. We don't think like that. I think until I have my cell phone charged up. But yeah, you could get there the first day and you could actually plow because of the openness of the land, the soil fertility, the loosest of the soil.

And so they find his body in one of these immense trees. But yeah, the chances of that. Oh, if I could have that tree with that body in it, I'd put that right in my living room, man. The tree or the body? I'd want to saw that chunk and have it sitting in my living room, right in the center of the living room. Yeah, it was John Stewart and Boone was very close to it. And he had broken up bones, right? It was one.

It was the upper left arm. It was like between the shoulder of the deltoid to about the elbow. There was a broken bone, and it was discolored from lead. And so obviously it was a broken. He got shot. He got shot. And Boone theorized it was probably getting cold or he was being chased or something. And he crawled inside the tree and died there.

Very sad, lonesome, forsaken death. Oh, it's haunting, man. And the fact they found it. Well, and you can give him a bear. And the fact that Boone was there when they found it. Yeah. And how did he identify him? How would he know this is Jon Stewart?

Probably his kit, right? I don't know. His gear? Yeah, he had his powder horn and had his name carved in it. Oh, really? Yeah, and Boone said he thought that he could kind of look on the skull and maybe put out some resemblances. I don't know how valid that is, but that is one account.

But, yeah, the powder horn had his name on it. And it was just distinctive. You said earlier that he had carved, the guy that was dead, that he had carved his name in a tree. Was that a common practice? Yeah. These guys are just kind of like, I was here, kind of a marking. Yeah. I mean, I think even now, you know, people want to leave their John Doe.

And it was common with American Indians as well. Trees that were along well-established Buffalo paths. The Buffalo paths were like the great interstate system. You know, we had this idea that they just walked out into the wilderness and go like, north. And they just somehow knew that. Well, no, they didn't know that. I mean, you could, you know could infer it, figure things out. They were very good at what they did.

But the Buffalo Trails, you know, the Buffalo East and the Mississippi had been there for several hundred years. And so they had their vast avenues. Some were lead traces. Lead meant they went someplace. Some just kind of petered out. Like, you know, you get in the woods today, you walk down a path. Sometimes it goes somewhere. A lot of times it doesn't. But along those trails,

there would be trees and they would oftentimes bark who was there. Indians oftentimes would leave cryptic, uh, animistic, animistic, uh, markings of, of their own devising. When Boone made camps in Kentucky, his first hunt, Boone would make decoy camps because he knew how the Indians made their camps. And so he would make a camp that looked like an Indian camp, like a Shawnee camp, but he would camp in cane breaks. And they would come by and leave marks like, come visit us. Man, how's it going? Yeah. Yeah. Earlier you kind of mentioned this,

that you get this idea of some guy going through the woods with a little backpack. But these guys, when they struck out, they had a big footprint. Yeah, pack horsemen. These are pack horsemen. And the dogs. Can you talk about the dogs a little bit? Yeah.

I mean, they had real distinctive dog breeds, some of which we kind of had their descendants today, like what we would call it a plot hound, you know, they're good cat dogs, you know, cat, I mean, Panther, you know, and, cur, like a yellow mountain cur or brindle mountain cur, you know, good catch dogs, good hold dogs. And a lot of people had bulldogs, like the American bulldogs. Dr. Thomas Walker, who came to Kentucky, you know, Boone was not, there's a lot of mythology about him. He wasn't the first guy into Kentucky, you know, long hunters didn't come in to bring civilization. That's the last thing they wanted. You know, they weren't trying to make the land free for God and country, hearth and home. Again, that'd be like the last thing they'd want there too. They didn't identify as Americans. None of that was, you know, they were, these are just guys that are making a living. But, you know, the first guy that really comes in and leaves a wonderful journal is Dr. Thomas Walker in 1750.

And Walker had developed his own kind of a foxhound, beagle-looking hound. We call them today Walker hounds. You know, I'm sure you've heard of those. And that's, yeah, that's another type that they had. And then Spaniels. Spaniels were popular.

Audubon had a Spaniel. He wasn't a long hunter, but that time period, close. And how did they use them? Like they had them around long hunter, but that time period, close. And how did they use him? They had him around, obviously, but in the notes it says it wasn't just for hunting. Yeah, well, I mean, think of yourself in kind of an aboriginal fashion. They're going to keep you warm, get them in there. If you're in that hollow log, that hollow tree, they're going to keep you warm, you know, get them in there. Like if you're in that hollow log,

that hollow tree, you know, they're going to keep you warm. You know, the term three dog night, not the band, but you know, that's the whole idea. That's how cold it was. Yeah, that's how cold it was. And, you know, definitely,

they can kind of be a liability. They bark, you know, and, you know, they give you away, but they're, they far more than pay for themselves advantage-wise because they can warn you, you know, you know, whenever they work both ways, whenever the Indians were sneaking up on the white camps, they had to be aware of the white hunter dogs. Whenever the white hunters were sneaking up on the Indian camps, they had to be aware of the Indian dogs. So yeah, I mean, they can, they, they keep you company. You know, Boone loved his dogs.

There's several accounts of Boone singing to his dogs. Yeah. And one like overheard by somebody. There's a story I heard. Yeah, that's the great, that's a great story. Can I tell that one? Yeah, sure.

We were talking about these long hunter guys that came out, you know, and, and the most famous brigades were led by, uh, James Knox, who did real well. Knox later, not so well long hunting, he did well enough long hunting, but he became a military figure. And, and, um, you know, when Boone was still out there scraping by, uh, sometimes Boone did far better surveying, but that had a kind of a shelf life too. Uh, Knox, Knox did well, and he would bring in his brigades. And one of the guys that came in with Knox was this Germanic guy, Casper Mansker.

How's that grab you? Casper Mansker? Casper Mansker. And they would come in. Sometimes they'd go through the Cumberland Gap. Osioto is what it was called. It was later, you know, Thomas Walker, we mentioned him, Walker named it the Cumberland Gap or the Duke of Cumberland, you know, the slaughterer of the Highlanders at the Battle of Culloden. But sometimes they would go into Cumberland Gap, but sometimes they would come, you know, from eastern Tennessee, western North Carolina, just cut straight through to French Lick.

French Lick today is known as what? No, no idea. Music City, USA. Oh, Nashville? Nashville, yeah. I mean, that was the, man, you talk about a teeming area for, you know, that was like an area of massive licks off the Cumberland River. Lots of Buffalo, lots of elk.

All of that. And, you know, like right there where the football, you know, where the stadium is for the Titans and everything. I mean, that was like major hunting area. But, yeah, Bansker was with the Knox and they hunt French Lick. And they go straight up to Kentucky, up towards the Green River. And they're in there and they hear the sound. It's kind of like part singing, part whistling and laughter.

And they go, what is that? That's not like any species we're familiar with. I'm sure they said that, two species is a big word in long hunter vocabulary. And so they put the guns on full cock and they're sneaking through the cane break and the sumac and they go like, and they're hearing the sound,

it's getting louder and louder and they peek through the cane break and the sumac. And they're hearing the sound, it's getting louder and louder. And they peek through the sumac and it's Colonel Daniel Boone. He's laying on a deerskin right in the middle of Indian country, just singing to high heaven. He's just happy to be there, man. Don't you love it? That's a great story. Yeah.

And then there are accounts of him singing to his dogs. And speaking of massacre, those guys, by the way, with Knox, you know, they killed so many bear, you know, again, we. With their hounds. Yeah. Well, I mean, they, yeah, they'd hunt them down, but, but, you know, whether they used dogs or not, you know, but they had dogs in those parties,

but they killed a lot of bear. You know, you, you could process the meat, but mainly they wanted the bear for what? They could render them into. Yeah. Boone got in that business? They could render them into. Yeah. Boone got in that business, selling barrels of bear fat. Yeah.

You could get about 25 to 40 pounds per bear. And they got, they killed so many bear and they had so much rendered fat that they just got a small bateau. And they, when they, they filled up the bateau with bear fat and they took it down, down the Mississippi and they, you know, they get down their path, Memphis, and they took it down uh down the mississippi and uh they you know they get down their path memphis and they get on down their path yazoo and nashville and they they they sold

their batu full of bear fat down there and a mansker bought a wedding dress for his bride to be off bear fat i remember i remember and his father-in-law stood it like him i remember reading one time that boone process booneone shot 13 black bears in a day one time, hunting with his dogs. Wow. Wow. No kidding. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, I. You're Sandy Creek. You would appreciate this because I know you had a grizzly run in. He had a grizzly run in in Missouri when he was about 72. He just kind of had that moment that I've never had, but you guys could probably tell us about where you just sense there's something there and you start hearing the, the breath. And, uh, he looked and there was a grizzly right on him.

He was checking his bear traps, uh, up there on the, uh, excuse me, he's checking his beaver traps on the upper Missouri. And he just jumped into a tulip poplar, uh a P-row and just shoveled off there into the Missouri. And he said later, he thought he was getting a little too old for this. I want to get into the two things that Boone people talk about now, the two mysteries. I think I know what's coming. Okay. I want to end on the unknown. And I know you've played in both of these fields. You've written about both these issues. The first one is, did Daniel Boone make it to the Rocky Mountains? Yeah, that's a, it's kind of like grace and works in the Bible.

I can kind of argue it both ways. But there's two accounts of Boone that have him fairly close to the Yellowstone. Okay. And they were written by, both of these written by children of those who have claimed to have gone with Boone. And they're written about 70 or 80 years after the account. And in one of the cases, especially the details are really great. I mean, they're really tribal specific, like who was on the trip and that they had Mackinac boats and they were attacked by snake Indians and kind of how that went down.

And yeah, it might have happened. I tend to remain neutral on that because what's happened since those two accounts that were written a long time after the alleged event was that you've had other stories about people that actually did go up, contemporaneous with Boone, like this hunter, this friend of Boone, his name was Michael Stoner. His son, George Stoner, wrote about that. And George Stoner says in his father's account, he said, Daniel Boone did not go on this expedition. I've got the exact quote. In fact, I published it. But other writers have taken part of Stoner's account and left out that part that Daniel Boone did not go. And they incorporated it with these other accounts that have Boone there and have created, for lack of a

better term, hybrid accounts. And then those get republished and republished by consensus historians and people go like, well, there you go. And so I remain neutral on that. I want him, I want that moment. I want that image of Boone's in the Yellowstone. To make it to the second West. Yeah. I mean, don't you? Yeah. Yeah. I mean- I'm rooting for him.

Yeah. I mean, it's like where Boone lived in Missouri, this little tiny Trapper's village. It's kind of, in my opinion, kind of like the missing link of the Western fur trade, La Charette. And it's, Lewis and Clark go through there on both legs of their journey. You know, 1803, 1805, right at that time period. And Zebulon Pike is there. You know. Is Boone there too? Well, see, there's no mention of Boone, but that's kind of like my point about this Rocky Mountain thing.

You know, you want that, you want that to happen. That he would have been rubbing elbows with those guys. Yeah. I mean, you know, like who's the big artist back in that time period? Alfred Jacob Miller. You know, you want that, that oiled image of Boone and Lewis and Clark and,

you know, like, like symbolically you're passing the, passing the torch, you know, and you want that image of,

I do, of, you know, Karl Bodmer, the artist or somebody painting Boone out there in the Yellowstone, you know,

but, but the dates are inconsistent. These hybrid accounts have proliferated and have appeared in books that are out there. And they may have other evidence that I don't have. I'm not going to discount that. But I do look at a lot of footnotes, and I see a lot of the accounts out there about Boone being in the Rockies. And if you'll start examining footnotes, you'll see that a lot of these stories

have nothing to do with Boone. It's the same way with the other mystery that I think that you're going to bring up. Yeah, here's the next mystery. Okay. Legend has it. Is this a paternity issue? Legend has it.

No, no, no. No, that's a great mystery, but we're going to get a different mystery. Oh, okay. Something new. Not even legend has it. The facts are this. Boone dies in Missouri. Oh, that

one. Gets buried. Okay. Later, even though he swore off Kentucky, said he'd never go back to Kentucky. Later, they come and dig him up and haul him over and rebury him in Kentucky and make like a little mausoleum for him there in Kentucky.

Or like a, what do you call it? What's the word I'm looking for? Yeah, yeah. The little vault. Yeah. Yeah. But then later some people come out and say, ah, I tricked you. That wasn't Boone.

He's still in Missouri. Yeah, I just wrote a book that addresses every bit of that. I don't know if I'm allowed to talk about my books. Yeah, well, that's the last thing you're going to do after you answer this question is you're going to tell people what books you wrote. If you want to go visit Boone's grave, do you head to Missouri or do you head to Kentucky? I head to Kentucky because what was left of Daniel Boone and what was left of his wife Rebecca, and people tend to leave her out, and by the way, we really ought to talk about

women on the frontier sometime, was exhumed and taken to Kentucky. Daniel Boone died in 1820. Rebecca died seven years before, 1813. Just imagine this. You go out on that little knoll out there and you said, I want to be buried right there. I don't want to be back in Kentucky because they treated me really bad on land deals.

And, you know, Boone always said, given the choice between going back to Kentucky and laying his head on a chopping block, he'd have no hesitation to lay his head on the chopping block. Really? Yeah. He didn't want to go back to Kentucky. You know, you had asked earlier about, you know, why did, didn't Boone like Kentucky? Yeah, Boone loved Kentucky. He didn't love what had happened to it.

He didn't love what had happened to him there. But yeah, his remains were exhumed. And if you read the accounts very carefully, it's very clear that they came and they dug up what they could find. You know, we're not talking about the greatest embalming methods in 1820. Mm-hmm. You know, and, you know, they get, and they put what's left of the boons in small pine boxes that are like wide enough for a pelvis

and long enough for long bones, femurs and stuff, and kind of high enough for skulls. And they're in small little boxes, and they take these back to Kentucky, and they inter them in September 1845. Nobody, when Boone was buried, and for 40 years, maybe 50, between 40 to 45 years after he was buried, nobody ever said anything about he may be in the wrong grave,

or they might have got the wrong bones or something like that. None of that ever happened. It happened by about 1880, 1890. Missourians, they want the boons back. They realize kind of like what they've done. And I just have to tell you, the Missourians really got kind of crapped on by the Kentuckians. The Kentuckians wanted to build a really, and they did, they wanted a fancy cemetery

for the state capitol. And so they organized a corporation, the Frankfurt Cemetery Company in 1844, and they wanted a garden cemetery. Garden cemeteries were really big in Europe. They were big in America, like in Mount Auburn and Boston. You cemeteries were really big in Europe. They were big in America, like in Mount Auburn and Boston, you know, but we got to have famous people. Well, who do we get? You know, you had to have a famous person to make-

To anchor the thing. Yeah. Well, people would come in and they would stroll around and there was an idea that it was kind of like spiritualism, which I know you've heard of. They think that you're not only communing with each other, but you're communing with the dead. And this is a garden cemetery. They would actually import in trees and shrubs and landscaping. It was a whole novel kind of thing. The cemeteries that they had then, like in Frankfurt,

you had a few church cemeteries with the leaning crosses and some old farm cemeteries where dogs were digging up bones and dragging them around. And so they really wanted a suitable cemetery for Frankfurt. And so to make this go,

you had to have somebody famous. And so who but, you know, the first family of pioneering in Kentucky, Daniel and Rebecca Boone. And so, yeah, the way that the needle is threaded a lot of times these days, people will say, I've had a number of Missourians who, at least up to this time of this recording, has accepted me as a friend and as a brother. There's still tension between Missouri and Kentucky about this politically. And, but they'll say, well, yeah, the Kentuckians came and got what bones they could get. But we have his viscera.

We have his heart. We have his skin. And they start really like kind of threading that kind of needle. Like he's mainly here in the soil, but they have some bones. So, you know, your original question, where should we go to visit them? Well, by that interpretation, you go both to the little cemetery, the David Bryan Cemetery in present day, Marsensville, Missouri, and then you go to Frankfurt.

But I don't think we make those exceptions about other people. Like, you know, if you bring back war veterans, like from, I don't know where you, you know, Vietnam or Iwo Jima or something, they don't go like, well, you know, we have a little bit, I mean, more of an Arlington, but the bulk of him is still over and, you know.

Incorporated into the minerals of the soil. Yeah, I mean, that's so, but I understand that. And, you know, both places have their validity and, uh, you know, it, it really is a shame, but, you know, Frankfurt, Kentucky, if were at me, like, where would I go and say, this is what was left of the man. This is where I would go.

Is there anything that we left out that you wish we would have talked about today about old DB? Yeah, I think, I think Boone fundamentally was a very good man. I think at a time when Americans could use heroes, that Boone in his own way kind of helps fill that niche. He certainly had his flaws. And we really have trouble relating to this time period. I mean, there's only very few times in Boone's lifetime, very few years, where he's not living in an era of a named war.

I mean, he's born in 1734. By 1744, you have King George's War, which is in New York. It's in Arcadia. It's spilling into the Caribbean. But that will help precipitate the French and Indian War. And he lives through that. And then you have this really very brief bloody epoch, Lord Dunmore's War of just death up and down the frontier. Boone lives through that.

You have the American Revolution. Then you have the War of 1812. And Boone's 72 years old, and he's still participating locally in Missouri in the War of 1812. He's helping guard forts and man palisades and so forth. It's just this. It's just a different time. It's just a different era. And we can't go back and judge people by those kinds of standards. I mean, they're not hunting to some kind of a recreational thing. I mean, it was extraordinarily hard.

And frankly put, you know, the frontier wasn't tamed literally until the women came out there. You know, it's the women that basically civilized the men. I mean, the women did everything that the men did, like Rebecca Boone. I mean, she shoots a flintlock. She skins a deer. She mans the palisades.

She molds bullets. She willingly takes her pewter, which is a precious item. They didn't have very much, and takes the pewter and molds that down and use that for bullets. The women would go out in teams while the men are gone long hunting or while the men are off skirmishing. The women go out in teams and plow. You know, one group would plow while another group would be out there with their guns and their muskets and their sometimes pitchforks and axes, whatever they had. And they would guard the women that were plowing. And after an hour or so, they would switch. And so it's when the women get out

there. I really am a firm believer, without being too cliched, that behind successful men, there are important, powerful women. And this is certainly the case of Daniel Boone. He was married to Rebecca for 56 years. She bears 10 children, and one dies soon after birth. They adopt four more from Boone's brother Israel. Then they adopt six more from Rebecca's sister who dies. You know, but they're really typical of the American pioneer. You know, the American longhunter is the first real American fist in the wilderness. John Stewart is the first American blood, true American blood, that's slain in the first salvos of the American Revolution before it really happens.

These guys were the driving force that helped found this country. And, you know, Boone was never a warmonger. You know, you had those kind of people just like you had in the ancient world, whether you're talking about Achilles or Napoleon or Patton or so forth. That's not Boone. You know, he didn't brandish his patriotism, but they founded this country. And enough can't be said.

They were the first, you know, my apologies to Tom Brokaw, the first great generation, and they should be given their due. He's been on the show. Indeed. We were talking earlier about Samuel Brady and Lou Wessel and these guys that turned into rabid Indian haters. Boone had every reason to be that, yet he was not that. He had his firstborn son, James, is killed by Indians. Secondborn son, Israel, killed, James, is killed by Indians. Secondborn son, Israel,

killed by Indians. Brother killed by Indians. Brother-in-law, John Stewart, killed by Indians. Brother, Ned, Edward, they call it, killed by Indians. And yet Boone never reverted to that level of savagery. Part of this is his upbringing. He was raised a Quaker. He really saw value in other cultures and he learned from Indians. His learning from Indians how to hunt not only made him successful as a hunter, but also just I think reveals a mindset of his true humanity. And this is a pattern that he'll have throughout his life. And in many ways, you know, we're flawed characters. We all have, I do, you know, tremendous feet of clay. But there's a lot about Boone that is very, very admirable. He never resorts to like the racial hating.

You had men in his day that literally would drag Indian corpses up to the fort, like Hugh McGarry would do this, and chop them up and feed them to the dogs because they were so embittered because of death in their own family and just the idea that somehow this gives them a personal revenge. And Boone saw this. How would I react to seeing that? I don't know. And how do you live in that and not revert to some level of savagery like that yourself. This is what's so interesting about Boone.

You know, you had men that, and this is one reason why people feared the forest. I mean, the term savage, we would oftentimes just apply this to Indians. They didn't just apply it to Indians. You know, the beast were savage. The forest were savage. The people within the forest were savage. The forests were savage. The people within the forests were savage. They feared that because it was seen as like this dark malevolent forest that you would revert to. Boone never does.

He stays this kind of figure of great humanity. And even today, why are we talking about him 201 years after his death i think for these kind of reasons his uh resonance is still there and then you have the just the notion of going over to the next hill and seeing what's over there and that really is you know that that heart that was beating under that buckskin coat. That's the heart of every American. That's something deep and precious in our own psyche, I think. Yeah. You got a new book come out recently. We're going to plug some books before we end here.

Okay, I'll tell you my favorite book. You tell me your new book. Okay. My new book is called Finding Daniel Boone, His Last Days in Missouri and the strange fate of his remains. And it covers every shred of where Boone is, the history of this entire episode, all the different stories and legend. It has the only forensic evidence that was ever done on the Boone skull cast. But it also incorporates a lot of information about Boone's last days in Missouri,

like the area that he lived in, in La Charette, Missouri. It talks a lot about his hunting and trapping, his last kind of adventures. And it's done in kind of a narrative combination of first person and third person, kind of like Tony Horowitz. I don't know if you like Tony.

Oh, yeah. Ian Frazier, those kind of guys. Yeah. I love their writing. And yeah, that one just came out that's available from the History Press. I'm looking at it on Amazon right now. I brought you a copy.

Oh, sweet. I didn't need to hit order. So I'll tell you how I found you, how I became a fan of your books. Your book, The Long Hunt, Death of the Buffalo East of the Mississippi, which is a good-ass book. Then my personal favorite,

which I read after that, was just The Hunters of Kentucky. And it tells the stories, methodologies, everything of the long hunters. Yeah. Yeah. The Hunters of Kentucky, a narrative history of America's first far west. Great book.

Thank you. Yeah. You put it on a like top 10 list in 2016 or something. One of my friends sent me the link. Really? Probably sold the piss out of them too, didn't we? Like hotcakes.

Yeah. Five cents a stack. I'm looking at it right now. 24.95 paperback. Well, I would encourage folks to, uh, if they don't mind to support my work,

I will say, um, yeah, my books are available on, on Amazon and Barnes and Noble from local Indies and so forth. I try to support them. The will say, yeah, my books are available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble from local indies and so forth. I try to support them. The new book out on Boone, on Finding Daniel Boone, that's the only real glimpse of Boone's Missouri years. I would like to do a much larger work. It actually was a much larger work, but I had to scale it way back.

If you want to dig in, though, on some of the subject we've covered most extensively here, The Hunters of Kentucky, Narrative History of America's First Far West. Phenomenal book. Thank you. Yeah, I got a phone call one day. It was March 6th of this year, and it was from

Western Writers of America. And I didn't, I let it record because I didn't know what it was, but I did a three-part trilogy on Daniel Boone's, this whole Rocky Mountain story. Okay. And for Muzzleloader Magazine. I write for Muzzleloader Magazine, a magazine for black powder aficionados. And, um, unknown to me, this three-part article from Muzzleloader had been submitted

to Western Writers of America and it actually won, um, best short nonfiction. So I went out to Colorado and. Oh, is that right? Yeah, I got a Spur award. Yeah, man. I mean, I got a, yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah.

And so, um, yeah, man. Yeah, man. I mean, I got a, yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah. And so, yeah. So. That's great. Your work was, your work was honored. Yeah. I thought it was a prank phone call at first because I have a lot of friends that would do stuff like that.

I had that happen one time when I was in college. Somebody called up and said, yeah, Glenn Campbell wants you to play with him. And I said, really? I started jumping up and down. I realized it was a girl from the dorm, the next over. I had just played with Glenn Campbell on a golf course, and so I thought he was calling me back.

I never got the call. That's great to have. That's great that your work was recognized. I'm a big fan of the books. I love the books. I hope people go out and get some. Check them out. Yeah, and before we wrap up,

as this episode airs, Clay Newcomb is in the middle of a multi-part series on Bear Grease about Daniel Boone. So if you're interested, go read Ted's books and listen to Bear Grease. Thank you for having me.

It's been a real honor and I really, really do appreciate it yeah and i'll point out to folks real quick that uh clay newcomb bear grease podcast is doing right now he's doing a couple pieces on boone focusing on the cumberland gap and what else is he focusing on phil oh he's he's diving into everything. I think it's going to be a three-episode series. But he's also tackling kind of like Ted brought up, how we needed heroes at that time. He's diving into kind of Boone's effect on pop culture and how we see ourselves as Americans

and kind of the societal impact and stuff like that. Yeah, fascinating character, man. All right. Ted Franklin Blue. Check out his books. Thank you. Much appreciated. Sure enough. Check out his books. Thank you. Much appreciated. Sure enough.

Appreciate you coming on. Thank you very much, sir. Yeah, I mean, you know, for a Kentucky boy by way of Florida, it's a big deal. And I really, sure enough, I really appreciate it. I wish your corporate up here didn't have a shirt right up, but, you know, can't have everything. Thank you. shirt right now, but you know, can't ever ever die. Hey folks, exciting news for those who live or hunt in Canada. You might not be able to join our raffles and sweepstakes and all that because of raffle and sweepstakes law, but hear this. OnX Hunt is now in Canada.

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